Why doesn't Larry Ellison give his $115 million to a place that needs it, like St. Joseph's University?

Wouldn't it be nice to pick up the newspaper and find that it wasn't filled with stories about Harvard? Everywhere you turn, Harvard is staring you in the face. Maybe Harvard's president is getting axed by the Jacobin faculty. Maybe a sleazy Harvard undergrad novelist gets caught ripping off other writers. Maybe someone at Harvard is recalculating the size of the universe or decreeing that early admission is unfair to innocent children or deploring the Laffer Curve or lamenting the decline of manliness. Or, if you're like New York Times columnist Joe Nocera, maybe you honestly believe that the public is just salivating at the prospect of reading yet another story about who's going to manage Harvard's money. Golly, what's wrong with a story about the guy who manages Texas A&M's money?

I mention this because of Oracle
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) Chief Larry Ellison's decision to withdraw his $115 million donation to Harvard. The loot was supposed to fund the Ellison Institute for World Health, a research center that, according to the Times, would focus on "examining the efficiency of global health projects." But after Harvard President Larry Summers, described by an Oracle spokesman as the "brainchild" behind the project, got the boot this spring, Ellison retaliated by pulling the plug.

Well, hold the Kleenex. Harvard is the kind of institution that doesn't even wince when a donor nixes a $115 million donation; it's like dolefully breaking the news to Prince Charles that petrol prices have jumped a shilling. At most other institutions, say, my alma mater, St. Joseph's University, getting jilted to the tune of $115 million would be financially ruinous. But people like Ellison never give $115 million to schools that could really use the cash; the money always goes to Harvard, Princeton or Yale, schools that already have more cash in their vaults than most African economies. This isn't just a case of the rich getting richer. It's a case of the rich being so rich that they don't even care if they're getting richer.

My initial reaction to the news about Ellison's welshing on the Harvard deal was: Gosh, I wish he'd screw my alma mater! How many times I have dreamed of opening the paper and reading headlines like "St. Joe's Professor Derides Shiite Initiative" or "St. Joe's Physicist Snares Nobel Prize for Charting Caterpillar Genome" or "Hawk Hill Luminary Tapped to Chair Fed" or even "Wall Street Wonders: Who Will Manage St. Joe's Money?" How many times have I fantasized about motoring down Santa Monica Boulevard past the streets named Yale, Harvard, Stanford and Berkeley and finding that a spanking new one--St. Joseph's Street--had been added to the roster? How many times have I wished that some devious money management outfit would christen itself the Saint Joseph Fund just so investors would be gulled into thinking that the firm was affiliated with the financial wizards at Hawk Hill?

It is too much to hope that Larry Ellison or Warren Buffett or Henry Kravis would ever donate $115 million to a noble but tiny institution like St. Joseph's. But just for once, if only for the prestige element, couldn't a Larry Ellison make a phony announcement about donating $115 million, followed by a press release stating that the $115 million gift has been withdrawn?

I think I speak for most St. Joe's alumni when I say that I'd rather have Larry Ellison not give $115 million to my alma mater than to actually fork over the moolah. We'd all love to experience that one shining moment of glory when the New York Times ran the headline "Oracle Chief Withdraws $115 Million Donation to St. Joseph's University; Hawk Hill Reaction: Ho-Hum."

Alas, that dream will never come to pass, just as Harvard alumni, like my daughter, can only dream of having a basketball team that doesn't suck. St. Joe's, let us note in passing, occupied the No. 1 slot in the NCAA rankings as recently as two seasons ago. And we didn't need Larry Ellison's money to do it.

Joe Queenan writes a bimonthly column for GQ. His latest book is My Goodness: A Cynic's Short-Lived Search for Sainthood. Visit his home page at www.forbes.com/queenan.

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